Preliminary conclusions. The commons of north west Europe

Ruling the Commons. Introducing a new methodology for the analysis of historical commons

“…As a consequence of this gradual shift, questions such as what the driving forces were behind the expansion of commons in western Europe from the late medieval period onwards, how communities were able to maintain these collective organizations, or which adjustments and changes they witnessed throughout time are becoming increasingly attractive for economic, agrarian and environmental historians. To this date, however, the number of works addressing these questions has remained relatively small (Van Zanden 1999;De Moor et al 2002;Casari 2007;De Moor 2009;Rodgers et al 2011;Laborda and De Moor 2013;De Moor 2015;Grüne et al 2015). With our project, our aim has been to push these recent efforts among historians forward -initiating a line of research which systematically sheds light on the internal workings of what until recent times has largely remained the 'black box' of historical commons.…”

Introducing Landed Commons: building solidarity relations for the common right to land

“…De Moor exposes us to various possible explanations of the origin of Commons in Europe, such as the Merovingian types of domain where inhabitants of their own home could acquire rights to use the forests and unexploited land in exchange for services for the domain's lord. The early Middle Ages also saw the rise of the seignorial system, whereby the Lord or the Seigneur claimed the common lands of the communities (De Moor et al, 2002). Other historians situate the origin of the Commons in the thirteenth century, as a reflection of the many modifications in rural life that took place then.…”

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from acrossWesternEurope, 1300–1800

“…In the context of late sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century population pressure in Cambridgeshire, in central England, many new households without land built on to the common or on to other tenants' lands were not given common rights at all (Spufford , 21, 133), and it was generally across Western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards that more explicit distinctions were made between dwellings with and dwellings without common rights (De Moor et al. , 254). Indeed, in an important paper in the journal Past and Present , Shaw‐Taylor empirically confirmed that the so‐called ‘travesty’ of loss of common rights through enclosures in England actually was not so disastrous for the agricultural labouring poor after all – ‘most labourers did not have common rights’ – and the rights they did have were meagre compared to the more prosperous farmers (Shaw‐Taylor , 125).…”